The online real-estate market is estimated to be worth Rs3bn market (as of FY14) and growing at c.40% YoY. The market currently has six players with 99 Acres being among the Top 2 operators. With players being well-funded, we expect all companies to aggressively advertise and invest in their platforms to gain traction. This will likely keep the competition high in the next 12-18 months, in our view
Majority of the online advertisement is done by developers/builders, especially when any new projects come up. Besides these, brokers and sometimes owners also pay. The mix is not expected to change substantially going forward. Most of the revenues for 99Acres? come from 8 cities (present in c.20 cities) with Delhi/NCR contributing one-third of its revenues.
99Acres lost its No.1 market share position in the last few months to Magicbricks as per Comscore (this data does not capture mobile traffic share). The company recently raised Rs7.5bn through a Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP) and intends to spend the amount almost entirely on 99Acres, to improve 1) verified listings; 2) map search; and 3) better user experience, among other things. In our
view, 99Acres will aggressively invest in advertising and content to regain its No.1 market share and, over time, will look to widen the gap between itself and other portals
